Witness for the Prosecution

Directed by Billy Wilder and based off Agatha Christie’s play, Witness for the Prosecution is an intriguing courtroom drama full of well thought out characters, engaging dialogue and plot that delivers surprise after surprise.

British lawyer, Sir Wilfred Robarts (Charles Laughton), has just been released from the hospital after suffering a heart attack that put him in a coma for two months.  He has a nurse (Elsa Lanchester) fussing over him every minute begging him to take it easy for a while, but when a juicy murder case comes up, the wily old man cannot resist.

Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) is accused of murdering a rich widow, whom he met by chance, befriended and idly hoped for an endorsement on his eggbeater invention.  The fact that he did not mention his marriage to her and that she left him a great deal of money looks like he led her on.  Leonard swears he is innocent and had no ill intentions.  The only person that can back up his alibi is his wife, Christine (Marlene Dietrich).

Christine is a cold, calculating type of person from Germany.  It turns out that she was already married when she went through a marriage ceremony with Leonard.  This means that she can testify in court on his behalf, but the whole case is turned on end when she instead decides to be a witness for the prosecution, brutally incriminating Leonard.

Charles Laughton earned a nomination for playing Wilfred as such a wonderful, crafty old man.  The way he slips away from his nurse, hides his cigars and brandy is just like any stubborn man.  He’s genuinely quirky and fun when he discovers his new lift for the staircase and rides it up and down.  His monocle test to see if Leonard and Christine are telling the truth is smart, intriguing and shows us that Wilfred has some interesting tricks up his sleeve.

Witness for the Prosecution is one of the best courtroom dramas I have ever seen.  The way flashbacks are set up throughout the film makes it feel more like a mystery, giving us pieces of the puzzle along the way.  All the characters feel real and intriguing, never flat and they never deliver stale or wooden dialogue.  The whole film seems to move like an old train, slow and chugging at first, but then flying at top speed at the very end, where a sudden twist creates a screech of metal on metal, nearly throwing the whole train off the tracks.  Sorry for the train metaphor, but the ending is so surprising and great that the voice during the credits politely asked me not to give anything away.  My lips are sealed.  You need to see this film.

“I am constantly surprised that women’s hats do not provoke more murders.”

 

The Reader

From the trailers and movie posters, it can be easy to dismiss The Reader as just another romance where Kate Winslet is naked all over the place again.  It’s not like that, at least not for the whole film.  Let me explain.

The whole story is spread over thirty years, beginning in Germany in 1958, where young Michael Berg (David Kross) gets violently ill outside Hanna Schmitz’s (Kate Winslet) apartment building.  She helps clean him up and guides him home in the pouring rain.  After Michael is well again, he goes to thank Hanna and they begin a sexual relationship.

This is the part of the film that makes it easy to write off Winslet’s Oscar winning performance as an award for most boob-shots, but she gets so much better later in the film.  The majority of her scenes with young Michael are in the nude, because their relationship is basically that Michael comes straight over after school, reads to Hanna for a while and they have sex.

Now, you might cringe and slap Hanna with some predatory label once you realize she’s in her thirties and Michael is only fifteen, but I don’t believe the relationship is based on sex to Hanna.  She wants to be read to and can sense what a healthy young man like Michael will gladly take as reward.  It’s an efficient trade-off.  We may assume she’s taking advantage of Michael, but he’s young and enjoying himself too much to even think of that, until she’s suddenly gone.

The story then flashes forward to Michael as a young law student, sitting in and studying a war-crime trial, where Hanna is trying to defend herself.  It’s at this point in the film that Winslet earns that trophy.  We see where she got that German efficiency, her matter-of-fact tone and can justify a boy’s first love for some story time.  When Michael realizes something that can turn the ugly trial around for Hanna, can he face her again or will he let her pay for hurting him?

The rest of the story young Michael is replaced by Ralph Fiennes and Winslet dawns a lot of makeup to create the aging Hanna.  I don’t want to give anything away, so just see this film.  I was honestly surprised at how intriguing it was and how much I enjoyed it.  There is a lot of sex and nudity in the first hour, which is fine because it helps define the relationship and isn’t pointless, but after that the story gets exponentially better until the very end.

I know I keep going on about this, but I do believe this is Winslet’s greatest role.  And Hanna is such a hard character to pin-point, you can’t simply dismiss her as a predator or good or evil or anything.  There’s a part of her that is ignorant, naive or lacking in something, yet can we really let that slide?  Winslet’s portrayal of this simple, yet mind-boggling woman is exactly why everyone should see The Reader.

“The notion of secrecy is central to western literature. You may say, the whole idea of character is defined by people holding specific information which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are determined not to disclose.”